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Weddings... finally! An all too rare moment for poems to shine! Time for all those neglected specks of verse to don their smart jackets and satin heels to help mark one of our most revered social rituals.

If you’ve ever been asked to read a poem at a wedding you’ll know that finding and reading the perfect verse is far from an easy task. The hunt for a poem befitting the occasion has unraveled many a wedding speaker, our Poetry Detective included. For those of us who don’t want to settle for one of the ‘top ten wedding poems’, where do we begin?

Vanessa Kisuule speaks to poets Caroline Bird and Rachel Long, who are compiling a new anthology of alternative wedding poems. Why is it so hard to choose a poem that works for a wedding ceremony, and how can people find a poem that really speaks to - and for - them?

"Yes, yours, my love, is the right human face / I in my mind had waited for so long". Stephen Walsh chose The Confirmation by Edwin Muir for both his first and second marriage, finding that the poem had changed for him over the decades and taken on new depth of meaning. Vanessa finds out how Muir's own love story informed the poem, speaking to writer Kenneth Steven about Muir's childhood on the Orcadian island of Wyre, and the huge losses he experienced as a young man before meeting his wife Willa.

'We two boys together clinging / One the other never leaving". In 1994, before same-sex marriage was recognised in UK law, Sarah Doyle was asked to read a Walt Whitman poem at the living room marriage ceremony of her friends Ford and Will. 25 years later she read the poem again at their anniversary party and wrote her own version of it specifically for the couple. Sam Magavern founded the Calamus Project in 2022 to celebrate the poems of Walt Whitman through film, song and live performance. He tells us about the moment in which Whitman was writing, with America on the brink of Civil War, and about the former Confederate soldier who became one of the great loves of Whitman's life.

Song version of "We Two Boys..." performed by Curtis Lovell accompanied by Luis Montijo; included with kind permission of Curtis and the Calamus Project.

Produced by Mair Bosworth for Â鶹Éç Audio
Mixed by Ilse Lademann